With increasing popularity of mobile voice and data communication, there is an ever increasing demand for high-speed data communication. Modern mobile terminals of a wireless network, e.g. smartphones, have advanced processing capabilities. The mobile terminals can run a wide variety of applications. These applications include social networks, e-mail services, update clients such as news update centers or weather forecasts, without being limited thereto.
Some of these applications continue to operate even when the mobile terminal is not in use. Some of these applications may continue to operate continuously or quasi-continuously even when a screen of the mobile terminal is switched off. In this case, the application(s) may continue to transmit or receive data via a modem of the mobile terminal. This causes the processor(s) of the mobile terminal which execute the application(s) to run for extended time periods. Moreover, also the modem is switched on repeatedly to allow the application(s) to transmit or receive data. This reduces battery lifetime while providing only limited benefit to the user when the mobile terminal is not in use.
To reduce modem power consumption, the mobile terminal may be set to different states. For illustration, 3GPP specification TS 25.331 V12.4.0 (2014-12) entitled “3rd Generation Partnership Project; Technical Specification Group Radio Access Network; Radio Resource Control (RRC); Protocol specification (Release 12)” defines different RRC states in section 7.1. The mobile terminal may enter some of these states autonomously, e.g. when a timer expires. However, the pre-defined transitions between different states may limit the versatility of controlling modem operation.
To control modem operation modes, which may have different power consumption, a dedicated signalling may be implemented in which the mobile terminal requests a wireless network to allow the mobile terminal to use another operation mode for the modem. Such techniques provide the wireless network with control over the usage of reduced power modes by the mobile terminals, but increase network loads.